23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

36.

The BlackBerry rang again. Clara pressed her hands over her pocket to try to muffle the sound, but she knew there was no point.

In the darkness she could feel people moving around her. Human people. Half-deads, like vampires, were unnatural creatures. You could tell when they were nearby because the hair on your arms stood up. Your skin prickled with gooseflesh, your body reacting to the sheer wrongness of the undead. The people gathering around her were human. She could only sense them by the small sounds they made. The noise of slippers dragging along the cement floor. Their breathing.

They said that when your sense of vision was impaired—say when you were in a perfectly dark room—your other senses grew stronger. It helped a lot if you were terrified that you were about to die, Clara discovered.

The handheld rang a third time. It felt like time was slowing down. Coming to a stop. Clara expected her life to flash before her eyes.

“Aren’t you going to answer it?” someone said, in the shadows. It was not a pleasant voice, even if it had the normal human timbre. Someone else laughed and it was definitely not a nice laugh.

Clara reached into her pocket and took out the BlackBerry. Its screen lit up the darkness for a few feet around her, but not enough to reveal what was lurking in the shadows. Just enough to hurt her eyes. She fumbled with the handheld, looking for the button that would answer the call.

“Put it on speaker so we can all hear it,” the voice from the shadows instructed.

They could see her. She was sure of that. They could see her face in the light of the BlackBerry’s screen. She nodded carefully. Then she looked at the glowing keyboard and pressed the appropriate buttons.

“Hsu? Hsu, are you there?” the BlackBerry demanded.

Clara bit her lip. It was Fetlock on the other end. “Uh. Hi. Deputy Marshal, this isn’t a good time—”

“So I gather,” he said. “Glauer wasn’t here to get your message. I sent him to fetch our lunch while we planned what to do about your absence. Lucky for you I monitor all of your calls, both incoming and outgoing. It sounds like you’re in real trouble. I’ve called the local authorities for Tioga county. They’re waiting for me to take the lead on any assault on the prison. As soon as Glauer gets back we’ll head up there—it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours. Can you hang on that long?”

Clara gritted her teeth. “I’m not alone right now,” she said, hoping Fetlock would take the hint. “I can’t really talk.”

“I need information, Hsu, if I’m going to put together an appropriate response strategy,” Fetlock insisted. He was not the type to take no for an answer. “Tell me about Caxton. You said you went up there to visit her, well, that’s very commendable of you, I’m sure. You get a gold star for being a good girlfriend. It turned out to be lousy timing, though. You said Caxton was at large. Has she killed any vampires yet?”

“No,” Clara said. “She—”

A hand reached out of the darkness and grabbed the Black-Berry away from Clara. “She’s going to have to call you back, pig. Right now she’s too busy begging for her life.” Before Fetlock could say anything more the shadowy hand pressed a button to end the call. The BlackBerry’s screen went dark.

A moment later it started ringing again. That would be Fetlock calling back, Clara knew. Wanting more information, even when it wasn’t exactly convenient. The handheld was switched off and then disappeared from view.

“I’m warning you,” Clara said, drawing her pistol. “I’m a federal agent. Assaulting me could get you in real trouble, you could—”

“What?” someone asked. She thought it was the one who had laughed before. “We might go to jail?” A face loomed out of the darkness. It was grinning from ear to ear. At first Clara thought it belonged to a half-dead after all; the skin on the face was raw and irritated. Then she realized it was just burn scarring. The woman wore a pair of earrings in the shape of swastikas—no, Clara saw, those weren’t earrings. They were tattoos. Gaping in horror, Clara raised the pistol and pointed it directly at the woman’s burnt face. “I will use lethal force if you don’t—”

A bare foot came in from the left, fast and hard enough to break boards. It hit Clara’s gun hand and she screamed in pain. The pistol clattered to the floor.

“I didn’t break any bones,” the owner of the foot said. She stepped into the light and just smiled at Clara. It was the kind of smile you might see on the face of a shark as it circles a drowning sailor. Clara was disoriented by the pain in her hand, but not enough to miss the fact that this new assailant had her feet slight apart, in a martial arts fighting stance, and one fist balled at her waist, ready to punch at the slightest provocation.

There were tattoos on this one’s face, dark blue prison tattoos that looked as if her eye makeup had melted and run down her cheeks. Clara looked closer and saw that they were in the shape of teardrops.

“I’m Guilty Jen,” the woman said, and gave Clara a slight bow.

Clara had taken four free lessons in Tae Kwon Do before deciding she didn’t have the discipline to keep going. She’d thought they would at least teach her how to punch somebody, but instead they had just made her stand in various postures and move her feet back and forth, over and over, for hours at a time. She had, though, learned one valuable lesson about unarmed combat. If someone bows to you like that, whatever you do, don’t bow back. That just means you want to fight them.

Judging by the precision and the force in the kick that had disarmed her, Clara very, very much did not want to fight this woman.

“Special Deputy Hsu,” Clara said, keeping her posture perfectly straight.

Guilty Jen’s smile broadened. She relaxed her fighting stance a little. “So you’re Caxton’s famous girlfriend. Well, well, well. How lucky for you that we found you just now.”